.. and was wondering if anyone knew how they got the Portamento-like sound out of the AY chip .. its the second sound in the demo (which can't be seeked, unfortunately) .. I don't recall having access to Portamento - do you think this is a trick, or is there a hidden portamento in the AY chip?

I must say that Puremagnetik appear to have made some extremely fat sounds out of the AY .. its inspiring me to consider a synth program for the Oric ..

Yes, that's what I meant by portamento .. so he's doing this by controlling the chip externally and not by a portamento/slide parameter in the AY .. bummer. Well, its still interesting to me to create an Oric-based synth .. the question then becomes, how to add MIDI to a stock Oric ..

It would need a card with serial port between the oric and the cumulubus, like we always did.

There is no specific need to do for a serial port, a part to add a DIN connector, and some components to follow the midi hardware specifications (it is really simple) as the midi ports are just simple RS232 compatible hardware, running at a specific baudrate (which is not a classical one, but all RS232 chip are capable of using this baudrate)

I'm quite familiar with MIDI but not sure how to go about interfacing it directly to the Oric .. which I know has RS232, and can be programmed to handle MIDI's baudrate (31250) .. I guess I'll have a look at some of the existing serial schematics that are out there for the Oric and see what I can do ..

Be careful to always use the same set of register (i.e not mixing use of register) as A3 is used to toggle the switch between MIDI and Minitel, so that a read or write to $0320-$0327 will switch to MIDI, a read or write to $0328-$032F will switch to minitel.